« Saturday | Main | Monday »
May 17, 2009
Sunday
Authored by JM
After an interesting night at a strange hotel, we were all thankful to be awake and leaving to go on the adventure for the day. We had breakfast at the hotel, which required us to ride down the elevator to the first floor before heading back up the stairs to the second floor. As we have already established, this hotel was poor and the food was a reflection of the hotel (the milk was literally boiling hot, maybe it was freshly pasteurized). After grabbing a little something to eat, we took the bus out to the wall that surrounded the inner part of the city.
The wall stretches 9 miles and encloses what used to be the center part of the city. This is one of the few cities in China that still has the wall in tact and it was cool to climb to the top of it. At the top, the best part was that we had the opportunity to rent bicycles. The bicycles cost 20 yuan to rent, but we ran into difficulties because everyone in our group wanted to rent bicycles. The shop only had about 5 single bikes and couldn’t accommodate all of our single bike requests. However, they did have plenty of double bikes, which John and I volunteered to ride. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the bike to work. Each time we went to start pedaling, the bike would start to lean to the left and we kept ending up in the wall. The rest of the group started to go on without us, so we decided to cut our loss and just skip on the double bike experience and pick up single bikes. It didn’t take us long to catch up the group and we were enjoying riding with everyone. Along the wall there were spots where we would have to pedal up a ramp and then ride back down a small ramp. The up ramp was easy, but on either side of the down ramp were small stairs. About half way through the way, we hit this down spot where there was a ramp, stairs going down, and then two golf carts in the middle. The three of us that pedaled through first were fine, but the fourth bike (a double with two guys on it, Danny and Alex) couldn’t make the decision about which path to take and decided instead to hit the golf carts. They completely wrecked the front axel on the bike, pushed the golf cart forward about 5 feet, but both were ok. They were lucky to be ok and also lucky to have crashed in front of another bike rental location. The guys who were in charge of the shop called to the other side of the wall and talked to our tour guide about the situation. Danny and Alex ended up having to pay for a new bike (50 Yuan…for a new bike vs. 20 Yuan to rent, which shows the quality of the bikes), but they were given a new one, which they were able to ride back.
After that slight mishap, the trip around the rest of the wall was pretty smooth outside of all the bumps that were in the wall. We made it back in a little bit under an hour and had a chance to explore this gift shop that was perched on top of the wall. The gift shop had some cool things inside, but it was really cool because it had a walk out on the 2nd floor that allowed us a see a great view of the wall and the surrounding area.
We were waiting on two more people, who also ran into a problem with their bikes. They ended up popping a tire some place along the wall, which caused them to be behind us by about 30 mins. By the time the group was rounded up it was close to 11:15 and we were a little behind schedule. However, the next stop was only about 10 minutes away. The next stop was a 6,000 year old village (or as our tour guide kept saying willage). The museum was literally just a patch of dirt with a roof over the top of it. They said it was one of the best-preserved old building walls and I suppose it did look like a village at one point, but it really wasn’t very impressive. What we ended up liking the most was the videos that were playing around the site. They were computer-generated images of the way the village was setup, so we could get a sense of how the huts actually looked at one point. We also watched a movie that talked about the village and displayed similar sets of virtual renderings of the village. We probably spent a little over 30 minutes at this site, which was in a really weird part of town (the road leading to the museum was dirt and the area all around was either destroyed or dilapidated buildings, with power lines literally just lying every where). After finishing at this museum, our next stop was lunch before heading to the terra cotta warriors.
The lunch was just a giant banquet room, which makes sense just because of the amount of tourists that proceed to the terra cotta warriors after. The food was pretty good and they had fresh noodles that they made in front of us, which I bought for 15 Yuan (It was definitely a rip off because the bowl was very small). After lunch though, we were all excited to head over to see the terra cotta warriors.
The museum for the terra cotta warriors was only about 10 minutes from where we ate lunch. The tomb is a national museum and it was obvious by the sheer size of the place. There was an entire village before we even entered the grounds for the museum, complete with shopping areas, a bank, and KFC. Once we were inside, we had to walk through gardens that they built specifically for tourists to walk through before we came to the main museum grounds. The museum is divided into different excavation pits. However, before we went into the different sites, we watched a video on the Emperor who built the tomb. The Emperor was the first to unify China in 221 B.C. and thus spent lavishly on his tomb that he believed would provided him all the things he would need in the after life. The tomb is the biggest in the world and it was started when he was 13 years old. It took 730,000 people 38 years to complete and the Emperor actually died while inspecting the tomb. After watching the video, we proceeded to Pit 1.
Pit 1 is definitely the most impressive site. They had excavated 6,000 warriors, which were all erected in battle formation. The sheer size of the place and the fact that they had only excavated ¼ of the soldiers from this location was hard to grasp. It was really cool to see them all, but unfortunately my camera died at that point, so we are going to have to steal pictures from other people that show the site. After Pit 1, we walked out the back door to Pit 2 and Pit 3. Both 2 and 3 were very similar. They had erected less of the statues and there was more rubble around the sites. Also, Pit 3 was an ongoing excavation so there were places where it was covered with plastic wrap. It was interesting seeing this tomb and trying to understand how/why they would have built it. We were asking about the actual tomb of the Emperor and why it hadn’t been excavated yet. There were a couple reasons that it was still underground, these reasons included the fact that it was surrounded by underground moats, contained a considerable amount of mercury, and was also 56 meters underground. She did say however, that the tomb contained a considerable amount of treasurer and also included the remains of the 3,000 concubines the Emperor had in his palace. The tour guide explained that the Emperor slept with a different woman every night, which resulted in him having a considerable amount of children. However, he only thought the first son was important and in his will he told the rest of the children to commit suicide, which they did and were then buried within the tomb. Seeing the terra cotta warriors was definitely an awe inspiring experience and one that made the trip to Xian worth it.
Having seen the terra cotta warriors, we all headed back to the airport to get ready for our flight back to Beijing. We had dinner at a restaurant that was in the airport and the food tasted very similar to the food we had at lunch (most of the food we have tastes very similar). Once we finished dinner, we passed through the security line relatively easily before heading to our gate. While we were waiting to board, we picked up an interesting stalker. Every time one of the guys went to the bathroom, this stalker would follow them into the bathroom. What was happening was that he would follow us in and literally stand in the urinal next to ours and peek over the divider. The first time it happened, we didn’t really notice, but by the second time we started to worry and conducted an experiment. Two guys from the trip went into the bathroom together and the stalker immediately followed them into the bathroom. While they were in the bathroom this time however, someone on our trip confronted him about the whole situation and he quickly disappeared.
The experience made the pre-boarding interesting and it wasn’t long after this that we actually got on the flight back to Beijing. The airline was the same as before, but the flight was much smoother. We got back around 10:30 and were back in the hotel around 11:30. It was a long weekend and we were all thankful to be back in a clean hotel and for a comfortable bed.
Posted by jfavorit at May 17, 2009 02:37 AM